Even in thinking and speaking all of this — in the awareness—I am no different here today — if anything, I’m worse — as now, the hysteria learned into me in my leanings through all these days, my inborn dependency for online realms remains so thick that often in temporary disconnection I cannot sit still. How now when the signal goes down, even for minutes, even just a particular wanted site taking its time loading in my cache — and it is always the site you need in hiding—need—each breath seems heavy, and my blood will tingle and fill with slowly rising heat — very much in the same way not sleeping does, I’m sick to realize — or as if whole sections of my home have been blocked off, some precious objects locked in rooms abandoned — the nameless, endless sections, nowhere but in there — without idea of when or where it will come back, if this time in crashing the browser will be off forever and those reams of rooms forever crushed into code and fed and wanting on and on and into me, reminding every instant that I am not endless, really, in time or dimension — how I too am failing — and yet the endless unfurl of selves shaking me awake every night — the true center of that unsleeping being not that I truly have no clear horizon, have no center, but instead that the me inside my body is always immediately right there, my bulk of thoughts as blank as anybody’s, stuck on e-mail, on repetition — human — dying — the very inches of me any instant all compounded, aging every instant no matter how I eat or breathe or move my head, no matter where I go in this long waking of the machines or the daylight, whether I ever sleep or not again.
Fear of Space
“Insomnia is not defined as a simple negation of the natural phenomenon of sleep,” wrote Emmanuel Levinas. “Sleep is always on the verge of waking up; it communicates with wakefulness, all the while attempting to escape it.” Insomnia, then, is also not simply a continuation of the self as Same, but the waking presence of the Other, “coring out” the self in conscious periods, the same way the Other works to core out the self inside of sleeping, while active defenses are down. There is a constant inner pressure of a presence there inside the self, pressed against another, outer pressure of what the self is not, beyond. Hegel refers to the Other as the alienation inherent between bodies, wherein “each consciousness pursues the death of the other,” complicating the waking state as constant vying, wrangling, definition in contexts of spheres of light. For Sartre, the Other is “the indispensable mediator between myself and me,” a feeling of shame erupted from the image of the self as we “appear to the Other,” forming an at once symbiotic and friction-making system open on all ends, in all lights. Lacan goes on to credit this infernal feedback system as the site of creation of language and speaking, a generative engine carried in our blank: “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” For Levinas, this haunting of the surrounding selves within our own singular waking creates a spiritual location, something beyond the nexus of flesh and thinking. Insomnia does not demand, within the self, a form, and therefore “signifies the absolutely noncontained (or the infinite).” It invokes “a soul that is ceaselessly woken up in its state, its state of soul.” Thus, through being forced to reckon with such forces that would normally be absorbed in dream or memory-removed ways, insomnia brings the self to face the coring selves and worms of Other there inside it, awakening, in distemper, something otherwise beyond.
Not sleeping most often does not feel transcendent, however — whatever stretch of spiritual lucidity might come over is most often accompanied by shades of aphasia, oppression, frustration, anger, ache. In the sled of not sleeping, colors lose their color, take on other colors, acquire sound. Senses learn their other senses, somewhat, if in a way complex logics in a dream might seem everyday — the intuitions or received impressions of that hidden space once pulled back into the human light again suddenly seeming far gone, or disappeared. Objects, in extended waking, seem to possess objects. Light is angry, licking your head. Communication struggles with its machinations — the speech and beeping of people and machines both softer and louder at the same time, communication’s multi-languages both more pulled open, brighter, and harder to hold in the mouth, invoke—this is not my tongue.
And yet, when charged with that idea of the other light, it is these selected spaces that can become the most terrifying when in certain lights they seem not quite what they were inside your mind — such as when being alone in a room you’ve lived in for years suddenly feels different when the light hits the walls a certain way or someone is knocking or there is sound inside the house you cannot name — or returning to a song, a place, a person you’d remembered fondly in such a way as how it’d shrouded in the mind, only to find it changed there, not yours, and even more malformed in presence in the image held in your idea of what it had once been. Fear drawn out of the familiar — instead of, say, a strange street — often feels that much more horrendous for it—this is not the place I always thought it was. The way these natured objects change (or do not change, but seem shifting inside, masked with faces you might mistake for home) in coalition with the self and its surrounding, developing a continual vortex of appropriation despite the appearance, on their outside, of permanence. Every moment up against every other moment that it is not, continually, forever — every moment never really held. The keyhole of the eye.
Meanwhile, in the body, when finally under, the effect of dreaming works in certain modes like experiencing any other kind of stress: heavy pressure on the chest, difficulty breathing, high blood pressure, a paralysis of limbs — and, in some, sleepwalking, tossing, chewing, automatism, gibberish — all mechanisms of simultaneous confinement and hyper-sound, unveiling repressed body. In some the terror might become apparent — aware of being trapped inside the self, and of being aware of being trapped, in certain angles, and of watching, from that body’s hold, as the trapping is going on — a meta-state much like that, perhaps, in claustro- and agoraphobias, or, on the other hand, the lure of autoerotic asphyxiation, smothering, and other, of a doom — of an overwhelming form impending — an approaching — other sound — new balloons. The body remains in throes desperate to communicate with the world around it, even while buried, caught between two states, fully in neither.
Between states, the body floats between the states of self — always bodied in the palpable present, but piloted with a mechanism that must coexist, and in the shift operate inside of methods that send signals between the versions — flares sent through skin. In his quasi-novel The Age of Wire and String, Ben Marcus defines the mode of snoring140 as another sleep-speech mannerism, ejected from bodies making more, or “language disturbance caused by accidental sleeping, in which a person speaks in compressed syllables and bulleted syntax, often stacking several words over one another in a distemporal deliverance of a sentence.” Marcus offers, of the nature of these disfigured words, a direct translation: “Pull me out, they say, the water has risen to the base of my neck.”141 Here the sleeping self, who will likely not remember or only remember portions of what has happened in conscious absence, can only communicate to the environment of human speaking in what seem malformed utterances, learned in life by most to drown out or disregard. The language of the self inside the self, spoken into an operant human receiver, is essentially gibberish, conducting only in its wake irritation in response to what Marcus interprets a gesture of pure fear, a metaphysical transmission of the self ’s anticipation of its own death held inside it, obliterated between fields.